Author Archives: Zack Weinberg

Interactive history sniffing and its relatives

Posted on 2 May 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Readers of this blog will probably already know that, up till the middle of last year, it was possible to “sniff” browsing history by clever tricks involving CSS, JavaScript, and the venerable tradition of drawing hyperlinks to already-visited URLs in … Continue reading →

Posted in Research | 14 Comments

Classical Mechanics Interlude: Acceleration to stop in a constant distance

Posted on 19 April 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Over on twitter, @MegaManSE asked does anyone know the equation to find the acceleration to stop a moving object in a constant distance given some random starting velocity? I didn’t, at the time, know … but I do know how … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Securing the future net

Posted on 6 April 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Today I had the fortune to attend a group discussion ambitiously entitled “Future of Internet Security” at Mozilla. What this was mostly about was, given that a recent incident has severely shaken everyone’s confidence in the PKIX (PDF, say sorry) … Continue reading →

Posted in Research | 2 Comments

Legibility of embedded Web fonts

Posted on 5 April 2011 by Zack Weinberg

It’s recently become possible to em‌bed fonts in your website, so that you aren’t limited to using the same old fonts that everyone already has on their computer. Yay! Unfortunately, there are a lot of gotchas. Lots of people discuss … Continue reading →

Posted in HTML &c | 22 Comments

Fantasy setting without the hack-and-slash

Posted on 18 February 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Several months ago, LJ user fadethecat posted a request for help identifying a dimly-remembered video game. In passing, she mentioned that Unfortunately, all the games I’ve found with that scale of “now direct your dudes to go chop down trees” … Continue reading →

Posted in Game design | 8 Comments

“Four Ideas for a Better Internet” 2011

Posted on 20 January 2011 by Zack Weinberg

On Tuesday night I attended a talk at Stanford entitled “Four Ideas for a Better Internet.” Four groups of Harvard and Stanford Law students, having just completed a special seminar entitled “Difficult Problems in Cyberspace,” each presented a proposed improvement … Continue reading →

Posted in Research | 1 Comment

Strawman: MIME type for fonts

Posted on 5 January 2011 by Zack Weinberg

For a little while now, it’s been possible for websites to embed fonts that all major browsers will pick up on. This of course implies fonts being served as HTTP resources. But it turns out that nobody has bothered to … Continue reading →

Posted in HTML &c | 10 Comments

Dead uncle Allotheria

Posted on 13 December 2010 by Zack Weinberg

Summaries of the rest of CCS’10 are still coming eventually, but what I want to talk about today is the Difference Engine No. 2 which I have now seen demonstrated twice: Mozilla had its annual meeting at the Computer History … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

CCS 2010, day 1

Posted on 6 October 2010 by Zack Weinberg

I’m attending the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (in Chicago this year), from yesterday (I’m skipping the workshops on Monday and Friday). Was a little to tired to write up what I thought of yesterday’s talks yesterday, … Continue reading →

Posted in Research | Comments Off

URL Canonicalizer

Posted on 14 September 2010 by Zack Weinberg

supposing for the sake of argument that you had a giant list of partial URLs (you know, like “www.example.com/blurf”) and you needed to canonicalize them and chase redirects and remove duplicates and dead sites and further you were aware that … Continue reading →

Posted in Possibly Useful | 2 Comments